I have plenty of beautifully-designed CDs remaining and am happy to mail you one if you contact me and include your address. But for the first time I am now releasing the full album as a free download. Please download and enjoy.

Since then I have been working on Drupal fulltime as a freelancer, both building sites and consulting. Needless to say in the past two years my skills have grown considerably, thanks to the amazing power of passionate self-education and in large part to the extraordinary cumulative efforts of the Drupal developers and other web folk who post helpful tips to the internet.

As a bit of a freedom-freak, I have enjoyed freelancing very much. While working in the corporate world made me depressed and lazy, working freelance pushed me to my mental limit on a continuous basis.

The CCK ‘display fields’ settings are very useful for theming nodes by content type, but I often find myself having to get further into customizing node output field by field.

Once I decide there’s no way getting around taking finer control of my node’s fields, I create a node-{type}.tpl.php by copying my existing node.tpl.php and open up Devel’s ‘Node Render’ tab. Then I delete the $content variable from the template and start adding things like

<?phpprint $node->content['field_image']['#value']; ?>

and

<?phpprint $node->content['body']['#value']; ?>

The $content variable is nice for amateurs, but we need the unrendered $node->content to get good control of a node.

While this gives me complete control over the output of the node’s fields, the drawback is that now if I add a new field to the node, or if I add a module that adds something to $node->content, I have to go back to my template and add in this new element. Because I often do my theming and development in parallel, this can be rather annoying, and there is also a danger that I could overlook doing it.

Therefore I think it may be more practical to use code like this in the node template:

“Move Closer to What Deaner was Talking About” is Rifle Nice’s ‘mashup’ of the Philadelphia WPVI “Action News” theme and Ween’s “What Deaner Was Talkin’ About” which was created for the Plain Parade compilation of Philly bands covering other Philly bands.

I often find myself needing to get rid of some of the sections on Drupal’s ‘My Account’ page. Not every site needs it to say ‘History: Member for 1 day’ for example, and if you use a lot of contributed modules that screen can get cluttered fast. So this morning I got sick of dealing with it, found there is a perfectly good hook_profile_alter there to work with, and wrote a little module to let administrators disable these fields. Let me know how you like it: http://drupal.org/project/myaccount_alter (currently Drupal 5 only)